I never get over how incredibly fucking crap Sex in the City is. Let me count the ways;

remedial storylines

truly hateful people

cliche laid upon cliche

ugly people (personality-wise)

absolute absence of comedy

Ho-ass biotchs!

tacky fashion / whore style

absolute absence of style / class

slutty slut sluts

reprehensible people

offensive caricatures / stereotypes

disgusting people (again personality-wise)

incredibly annoying actors / acting

they is all witches, yo!

I HATE NY

Honestly I could go on, but my gums are bleeding from all the seething and teeth gnashing. You see, it’s playing in the background on my telly box at the moment, and I’m too lazy to change the channel. I am a lazy man. A very lazy man. Lazy man. Lazy.

Back in the 80’s we used to laugh our asses off at American style (think Dynasty, Bon Jovi, etc.) but now these interminably vile harridans are somehow the very essence of chic. It truly is a testament to America’s ability to sell / market shit as shinola. We is all their bitches, yo!

I’m not sure exactly when or how I began to doubt. But I remember what happened the first time I expressed that doubt. It was a few months after the ’67 war. A special visitor came to our Sunday school class. He was in his early 20s, with thick fair hair falling over his forehead, a snappy sports jacket and polished loafers. Some of the girls whispered that he was cute. He had an accent but it was nothing like our grandparents’ accents. He looked and dressed like us but he had been a soldier in a war and that made him an alien being. Smiling, he perched himself casually on the front of the teacher’s desk and told us about the remarkable achievements of the Israeli army. He told us that the Arabs had planned a sneak attack but had met with more than they bargained for. They were bad fighters, undisciplined soldiers. And they were better off now, under Israeli rule. “You have to understand these are ignorant people. They go to the toilet in the street.”

Now something akin to this I had heard before. I had heard it from the white southerners I’d been taught to look down upon. I had heard it from people my parents and my teachers described as prejudiced and bigoted. So I raised my hand and when called upon I expressed my opinion, as I’d been taught to do. It seemed to me that what our visitor had said was, well, racist.

I felt the eyes of the teacher and the other kids turn on me. They were used to me spouting radical opinions but this time I had gone too far. Angrily, the teacher told me I didn’t have any idea what I was saying and that there would be no discourtesy to guests in his classroom. The young Israeli ranted bitterly about Arab propaganda and how the Israelis treated the Arabs better than any of the Arab rulers did.

[…]

Today, as cracks show in the presumed monolith of Jewish backing for Israel, increasing numbers of Jews are interrogating and rejecting Zionism. Nonetheless, the existence of anti-Zionist Jews strikes many people – Jews and non-Jews – as an anomaly, a perversity, a violation of the first clause in the ethical aphorism of Hillel, the first-century rabbi and doyenne of Jewish teachings: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”

Zionism is an ideology and a political movement. As such it is open to rational dispute. Jews, like others, might view the Jewish claim to Palestine as irrational, anachronistic, and intrinsically unjust. They might consider the Jewish state to be discriminatory or racist or might object – on political, philosophical, or even specifically Jewish grounds – to any state based on the supremacy of a particular religious or ethnic group. As Jews, they might reject the idea that Jewish people constitute a “nation”, or at least a “nation” of the type that can or should become a territorial nation-state. Or they might have concluded on the basis of an examination of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians that the underlying cause of the conflict was the ideology of the Israeli state.

Any or all of the above should be sufficient to explain why some Jews would become anti-Zionists. But that doesn’t stop critics from placing us firmly in the realm of the irredeemably neurotic. Whenever Jews speak out against Israel, their motives, their representativeness, their authenticity as Jews are questioned. We are pathologised. For only a psychological aberration, a neurotic malaise, could account for our defection from Israel’s cause, which is presumed to be our own cause.

Anti-Zionist Jews are not and do not claim to be any more authentic or representative than any other Jews, nor is their protest against Israel any more valid than a non-Jew’s. But “If I am not for myself”, then the Zionists will claim to be for me, will usurp my voice and my Jewishness. Since each Israeli atrocity is justified by the exigencies of Jewish survival, each calls forth a particular witness from anti-Zionist Jews, whose very existence contradicts the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere.

A brief insight into the ontogeny of a Jew who happens to be anti-Zionist. Please read in full.

First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.

Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12. There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.

Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter. Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.

“She said she was in pain, that she couldn’t breathe,” he said. “A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound, she couldn’t breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating.”

From a piece of cloth the family fashioned a white flag, which Abu Saif’s mother carried. His wife, Samar, went with them out into the street carrying Safa’s corpse. An Israeli tank was parked a little way off and shone its lights at them. Twice the tank fired in the air over their heads, they said, until eventually they gave up and turned back for home to spend the night in the flat, the family and six other children and Safa.

Only yesterday morning did Abu Saif finally manage to cross safely out of the fighting and to a hospital morgue, where his daughter’s body was prepared for the funeral. But Safa’s mother and siblings were still in the house, surrounded by fighting and unable to join the mourners. The roofs of nearby buildings were still dotted with Israeli soldiers. It was from there the bullet that killed Safa was fired, the family believe.

A few questions;

Q: does the IDF understand that when you fire indiscriminately into civilian buildings there are almost always innocent casualties?

A: I think they know full well what they are doing.

Q: are they infected with an American-style bloodlust?

A: apparently they are.

Q: does Israel live in a solipsistic fantasy world?

A: the evidence would suggest it does.

Q: do they really think that anyone believes they have anything other than the annihilation of the Palestinians as their goal?

A: yes, they really do believe (see above).

Later on the article continues;

There is no doubt that many of the Palestinian dead were indeed militants, some involved in launching rockets towards Israeli towns. Several Hamas fighters were visible in Jabalia in their black fatigues, some armed, one carrying what appeared to be a detonator.

But the number of civilians, including children , among the dead and injured was inescapable.

The definition of inescapable from the Free Dictionary;

Impossible to escape or avoid; inevitable

One final question;

Q: does the Guardian, like Israel, think that the massacre of civilians, including children, is impossible to escape or avoid?

While only controlled demolitions are known to have exhibited the observed nature of the towers’ falls, other experts, of differing backgrounds, find other fatal flaws in the official conspiracy theory. Dr. Hans Koechler has recently called the ‘official conspiracy’ theory a “dogma of political correctness”, characterizing the ‘official theory’ as one in which “19 Islamic-inspired Arab hijackers, directed by an elusive “Al-Qaeda” (“base”), succeeded in carrying out the atrocities all by themselves.” But, of course, being superstition, it doesn’t matter to Bush’s ever dwindling base that none of the ‘hijackers’ were accomplished Cessna pilots. Miraculously, they flew airliners with impossible precision. The official conspiracy theory is a fairy tale told to gullible goppers to make them feel better about being greedy, self-absorbed goppers for whom America is superior to an inferior world. The official theory relieves them of all responsibility for GOP policies which have over a period of at least 30 years made terrorism worse. If the ‘official conspiracy theory’ had been designed to dull critical thinking abilities, it succeeded.

I don’t believe any of the official conspiracy theory; not a fucking word of what Bushco and the 9th-of-November commission have to say on the subject. Never have, never will. And I can’t believe that anyone else still believes the official story, the same way I can’t believe that 18% of Americans still approve of that imbecile-in-chief.

In fact anything those monsters assert as truth I would necessarily assume to be diametrically opposed to the neighbourhood of the truth. Because they are worse than liars. They are a gang of murderous criminals, and warmongering genocide artists.

The interweb is a wonderful series of tubes which often directs to my lappy the most wondrous of sights and sounds. For example right now I’m listening to Yo La Tengo (one of my very favourite bands) playing live on WFMU. I love technology!